Bed Bugs!

I was not having a fun day yesterday. It was the end of what felt like a very long week with George home sick and running a fever for the entire week and Rob revising for his university exams and requiring much support and encouragement. I was helping Rob with trigonometry for one of his exams – always a strain for both of us. He is not what you’d call a ‘natural’ and I am rubbish at explaining things, so we both get frustrated.

Then the day got much worse. Eliza, who was on her day off, appeared and asked me to come to have a look in her room because she was worried she had bed bugs. She certainly did. They were all over the place. I’ve always had a morbid dread of bed bug infestation; I know how intractable it can be. I felt completely horrified. We threw away the mattress, the bed base, the bedding, two rugs, a huge fleecy blanket and quite frankly I’d have thrown away the entire contents of her room if I’d thought she would let me. I promised to replace everything (IKEA, here I come). It being Friday there was no chance of getting pest control in but I went out and bought a steamer, apparently steam kills them. The internet says spraying them with rubbing alcohol will kill them too, but of course you can’t buy anything so wicked in a Muslim country so I bought insect spray. She sprayed, steamed and vacuumed her room. I returned to the trigonometry.

The trigonometry was interspersed with endlessly cleaning out the cat litter for our rescue kitten, which, though it seems lively enough has had diarrhoea since we got it. Then the dog got diarrhoea. I was beginning to feel the fates were plotting against me.

Finally Rob and I both lost the will to live and gave up with the trigonometry. He went off to strum his guitar and pretend to pack and I went to make his favourite pasta as it was his last night. Draining the spaghettini I fumbled the colander and it all slithered into the sink. It would probably have been fine, the sink was perfectly clean but I was so fed up by then I threw it all in the bin in a fit of pique and boiled another pan of water.

Just as the water came to the boil the gas ran out. It always happens at night and means crouching down outside in the dark with a torch, under the very scratchy bougainvillea and attaching a new bottle. I always keep 2 spare bottles, replacing them as they run out. Except I hadn’t and all three bottles were empty. In the five years we’ve been here it’s never happened because I’m usually quite organised about it. This tipped me from irritability into extreme grumpiness and having rejected pasta that was fished out of the sink I found myself considering using pasta that was fished out of the bin… Instead I decided to see what would happen if I put the spaghettini into almost boiling water and just left it. I’ve always thought pasta could only be cooked in a big pan of water at a rolling boil but it was actually perfectly fine so we managed a decent supper, but just in case things were looking too positive Rob came knocking on our bedroom door and woke us at 1.00am to say he’d been lying in bed and found a beetle on his shoulder. I just put my head under the pillow and let Michael go and investigate…